As the other thread seems to have gone in the direction of material support for nuns, which is of course great and much needed and appreciated, I want to focus a little more here on another aspect I touched upon and something I only recently started fully appreciating.
Some years ago I did not notice this, or did not want to notice it, even though I heard other nuns say things. I thought it was just them. At first I took it all in my stride, thinking it’s part of the path, it’s just the way things are and just be equanimous with it all. But now it is slowly creeping up on me, I have begun to see the detrimental effects on my own mind.
You might not have an adblocker on your browser. You might think that those commercials have no effect on you; you never had the intention of buying that stuff anyway. But if you keep on seeing these ads, even without paying attention to them, over and over again, they actually start having a subconscious effect on the way you see things and the way you behave. This is how marketing works.
It’s just all these small little signs that if they happen once or twice you don’t think anything of it. Like a monk ignoring you or starting to get nervous when he accidentally finds himself in your presence. Or a monk not wanting to sit anywhere near you, or when you see that senior nuns always have to go behind the junior monks on Pindapata if they are allowed to go at all. Or when you have to sit on a lower seat than monks junior to you. Or when you accidentally touch the box of tea-bags, and it has to be re-offered to the monks. There are so many little signs, too many to list here, that just say: you’re different, you’re inferior. The lay people also pick up on those signs and start acting like that to you as well.
Even those monks who see it have to face the pressure from their peers and superiors. A friend telling me he cannot talk to me because I’m a woman and his superiors won’t agree or the lay people will get upset. Another telling me I should talk to the nuns. But amongst the nuns we can all only just say the same thing. We can try to support each other, telling each other: “it’s not you!”, but as long as we cannot have an open and honest dialog about these things with the monks, nothing is going to change; they will never understand. Like I could never appreciate this until it happened to me. But they stay safe behind the comfortable walls they have built; for them all is well, why put in the effort to understand?
I look into my own mind and find it harder and harder to fight against this. Like a relentless virus that keeps creeping in, wispering: “you’re not like them!”. I can so understand why so many nuns disrobe. It’s not just the material support; that’s only part of the picture and just one more of those subconscious triggers saying: “you’re not worthy of the same support as monks”. It’s the very slow and gradual undermining of your psyche, an almost imperceptible force that eats away at you until you cannot go on any more.
All in all it’s just another brick in the wall.
- but these are not the focus of the present thread.)
